Search

The paper investigates one of the possible models of the modern state, namely: the Schumpeterian Workfare State, on the basis of the analysis of scientific literature. The author gives an assessment of the phenomena that determined the transition to a new production and technical paradigm of Post-Fordism. The paper elucidates the preconditions of formation of the idea of the Schumpeterian Workfare State and its essential characteristics. In particular, it is noted that the model of the Schumpeterian Workfare State is applicable to any capitalist states at the present stage regardless of whether they have passed the stage of Fordism. The author proposes his own definition of the category of the Schumpeterian Workfare State that was missing in the modern domestic theory of the state. The author poses a number of problems that we must resolve for theoretical understanding and practical application of the model of the Schumpeterian Workfare State. To this end, the author believes that it is necessary to update the doctrine about the state in the national science to create solid theoretical foundations for the development and functioning of the Russian Federation at the modern stage.

Sermaye birikim sürecinde ‘kent’, hem üretim ilişkilerinin içinde gerçekleştiği yer olma özelliğine sahip olması bakımından hem de zamanla sermaye tarafından metalaştırılarak kullanılan bir birikim kaynağına dönüşmesi nedeniyle oldukça önemli bir işleve sahiptir. Kapitalizmin her safhasında gerek fiziki gerek sosyo-ekonomik koşullarıyla önemli ölçüde farklılaşan ‘kent’, her yeni dönemde işlevsel ve yapısal olarak farklı form ve rollerle karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bu makalenin başlıca amacı öncelikle kapitalizm ve mekan ilişkisini sorgulamak ve sonra kapitalizmin farklı dönemlerinde kentte gerçekleşen değişim ve dönüşüm süreçleri ile kapitalist üretim ilişkilerinin bağlantısını kurmaktır. Bunu da özellikle iki farklı kapitalist dönemi baz alarak, Fordist ve Post Fordist safhada, bir dönemden diğer döneme geçişte değişen dinamikler üzerinden gerçekleştirmektir., In the capital accumulation process, the 'city' has a rather important function both from the perspective that it is the place where production relations take place and as it has, in time, been transformed into a tool of accumulation, commodified and used by capital. The “City”, which has changed significantly with both its physical and socio-economic conditions at every stage of capitalism, presents itself with different functional and structural forms and roles in every new phase. The main purpose of this article is to connect the processes of change and transformation that have taken place in the city in different periods of capitalism with the relations of capitalist production. It does this by focusing particularly on two different capitalist periods, the Fordist and Post-Fordist stages, and examining, in this context, the dynamics that emerged during the transition from one period to the next.

В статье исследуется феномен позднего капитализма. Поздний капитализм рассматривается как форма капиталистического производства, которая пришла на смену развитым формам капитализма 1950-х — 1960-х гг. Иначе данный переход именуется переходом от фордизма к постфордизму.Фордизм определяется как социально-экономическая система, возникшая в послевоенный период на Западе (США и Западная Европа) и типичными особенностями которой были массовое производство в рамках крупной вертикально интегрированной корпорации, а также создание соответствующих стабильных массовых рынков. В противоположность фордизму постфордизм представляет собой систему, которая сформировалась в условиях начавшейся глобализации и отражала в значительной мере как изменения на глобальных рынках, так и собственные внутренние противоречия фордизма.Последовательно рассматривается сначала становление фордистской системы (производственный и социальный проект Форда и послевоенный «фордистский компромисс»), а затем становление постфордистской системы. Особенности последней раскрываются на примере известной концепции американских авторов М. Пиоре и Ч. Сабеля. Также на материале концепции французских исследователей Л. Болтански и Э. Кьяпелло рассматривается идеология современного (позднего) капитализма. Для того чтобы показать многообразие форм (в том числе региональных) позднего капитализма, автор обращается к концепции известного американского социолога М. Кастельса.На примере фордизма и постфордизма можно убедиться в том, что капитализм — весьма гибкая и адаптивная система, однако постфордизм представляет собой как бы радикализацию «гибкости» и инновационности, изначально присущей капиталистической системе.

Free software development and the technological practices of hackers have been broadly recognised as fundamental for the formation of political cultures that foster democracy in the digital mediascape. This article explores the role of free software in the practices of digital artists, animators and technicians who work in various roles for the contemporary digital visual media industries. Rather than discussing it as a model of organising work, the study conceives free software as a production tool and shows how it becomes a locus of politics about finding material security in flexible capitalism. This politics is ultimately contradictory in that it extends creative and craft autonomy of digital artists but does not mobilise a critical project. Instead, it nurtures further precarious labour. Empirically, the article draws on ethnographically collected material from the media practices of digital artists and programmers who engage with two popular free software production tools, Blender and Synfig.

Book Review for Bojana Kunst's most recent publication 'Artist at Work. Proximity of Art and Capitalism'.

Der Beitrag greift den Diskurs um die Formen 'primitiver Akkumulation' auf, um in Anschluss an David Harvey das 'Theorem fortdauernder Landnahmen' im Feld sozialer Reproduktion zu diskutieren. Erklärter Anspruch des Beitrags ist es, zum einen eine 'Erweiterung der marxistischen Akkumulationstheorie' vorzulegen, zum anderen die von Rosa Luxemburg angestoßene Debatte zur erweiterten Akkumulation im neuen Kontext zu theoretisieren sowie für die Externalisierung der Kosten gesellschaftlicher Reproduktion zu sensibilisieren. Zu diesem Zweck wird die jüngere Luxemburg-Rezeption vorgestellt, namentlich die Lesart der Bielefelder Soziologinnen, die Ausdehnung des Reproduktionssektors im Rahmen des Postfordismus dargelegt sowie die 'neue Landnahme' am Beispiel von Care-Arbeit und Care-Ökonomie (allg. personenbezogene Dienstleistungen) problematisiert und schließlich viertens ein Fazit gezogen, das Luxemburgs Imperialismustheorie mit der 'Artikulation unterschiedlicher Produktionsweisen' im Zentrum als theoretisch zentral erachtet und zur Basis eines feministischen Ansatzes sozialer Reproduktion erklärt.

Historisch-materialistische Kritik gängiger Erklärungen des gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisses im Kapitalismus fördert idealistische, kulturalistische und politizistische Verkürzungen zu Tage. Eine kritische Theorie des gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisses auf Basis des Marx‘schen Hauptwerks Das Kapital zeigt, dass die Gesetzmäßigkeiten der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft notwendig zu systematischer Naturzerstörung führen. Die kapitalistische Produktionsweise ist mit nachhaltiger Entwicklung unvereinbar.

Autonomy, or the extent to which employees can control their own work, is a central theme in debates on organizational flexibility and labour market stratification. Predictions of upskilling and autonomy, for manual workers too, have been a striking component in visions of post-Fordism and post-industrialism. The two main comparative labour market theories — the varieties of capitalism school and the power resources approach — suggest that both the level and the distribution of autonomy vary across production contexts, either because of national differences in skill requirements or because of the varying strength of organized labour. The objective of the article, based on the 2004 European Social Survey, is to test these two hypotheses by examining national variation regarding mean levels and class differences in autonomy among 21 countries. The main conclusion is that both mean levels and class differences in autonomy have much more to do with the strength of organized labour than with the skill requirements of production. The analysis also questions a central element of the varieties of capitalism theory, namely the notion of national production strategies based on differences in skill specificity.

This essay investigates the political economy of sexuality through an interpretation of sex shows for foreigners in Bangkok, Thailand. Reading these performances as both symptoms of, and analytical commentaries on, Western consumer desire, the essay suggests the ‘pussy shows’ parody the mass production that was a hallmark of Western masculine identity under Fordism. This reading makes a case for the erotic generativity of capitalism, illuminating how Western, post-Fordist political economy of the post-1970s generated demand for these erotic services in Asia and how Western, heterosexual masculine desire is integrated into global capitalist circuits.

This thesis examines the way that subversivity is produced in relation to the name of the author, as understood by Foucault, and what potential for ressistance that can be glimpsed there. This from the reading of three text that in different ways relate to that theme. Firstly, throught the reading of "Isis mamma är genusvetare, skribent och konstnär, min mamma är f.d. städerska, kokerska och dagisfröken, numera förtidspensionär med diagnosen fibromyalgi" by Lidija Praizović, a text that actively work with the internal production of different exteriorities. The text uses these exteriorities, both to commit the violation needed in order to establish it's perspective toward a capitalist publicity, and to anticipate the response and argument towards the text in the same publicity. The becoming of the proletarian class awereness is in the text partly formed in terms of origin and political ressentiment. But when used in litterature the analysis show that they produce subversive collective assemblies and question the border of political discourse. The way we become subjects in submission in terms of being bodies, irrational, specific in relation to a liberal sphere that produces the superior as invisible and bodyless, can establish it's pespective as human and universal when turned into literature. Throughout this processes the proletarian position is produced as an instance of power both internal to the text and pointing outwards, from the text. The analysis futher shows how conventions that regulate the spreading of discourse through the name of the author in capitalism, can be used to circulate experiences of submission that has the formation of collective assemblies as their potential. A process that is directly related to the post-­‐fordist capitalisms needs for new forms of life in order to reproduce. The two other texts, "Nej, man har inte rätt att skriva vad man vill" by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck, and "I huvudet på Lidija Praizović" by Tove Folkesson, was produceed as a reaction to the first texts apperance in the public sphere. The first one is critical to the text and the name, but is still making claims on a subversive position. The reading of it shows that the making of that claim, in relation to the need to produce ones own name as an author name in community with the liberal public sphere, results in a blocking of the subversive potential and a reduction of the subversive to only a marker on the name. A reaction that is in turn foreseen by the first text in it's working with the anticipation of readers responce. The reading of the second text shows how, throught the production of a complete affinity with the exteriority that is the athor name of Lidija Praizović, the potentially dangerous class position is reduced and disarmed. That occurs partly throught a reduction of the class position to aspects that only allows political ressentiment and loneliness. This turns the subversivity and the violation associated with the name of Lidija Praizović to functions for the name of Tove Folkesson. Something that in turn shows not only the potential of using these aspects of political becomings as grounds for building something that goes beyond them, but also the dangers of it. Both texts can therefore be seen as two different attempts to block the spreading of the subversive by using it solely to produce the name of the author.

This thesis analyses the extent and limitations of the Icelandic response to the financial crisis in 2008 with the use of Fligstein and McAdam’s Field Theory and Post-Fordist theory of modern Capitalism. The thesis establishes the existence of a pure Post-Fordist regime of accumulation, and holds that while state and labor have asserted significant influence on the post-crisis policies they have primarily served to reproduce the power of capital due to domestic and transnational Post-Fordist constellations. The Post-Fordist structures are found to reduce the effects of the egalitarian policies, and increase the relative power of capital within the Icelandic society. The labor unions have converged with capital interests, defended the Occupational Pension Funds at the cost of labor interests, and become proponents of expanding the Post-Fordist regime. The state has reproduced a refurbished status quo in the bank market and established control by confining to a multitude of social roles inherent within the state- and market structures. The extent of labor and state influence are further found to be the main deviations from the general European context, and the analysis brings out the holistic synergy between the two theories in explaining state decision-making in the contemporary political economy.

This article examines the changing relationship between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe, and outlines some of its implications for the geography of world capitalism in the late twentieth century. Most accounts of global cities are based upon a ‘zero-sum’ conception of spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declining power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the state scale is said to contract. By contrast, I view globalization as a highly contradictory reconeguration of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub- and supra-state scales. The resultant, re-scaled coneguration of state territorial organization is provisionally labeled a ‘glocal’ state. As nodes of accumulation, global cities are sites of post-Fordist forms of global industrialization; as coordinates of state territorial power, global cities are local-regional levels within a larger, reterritorialized matrix of increasingly ‘glocalized’ state institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy through which these transformed ‘glocal’ territorial states attempt to promote the global competitive advantage of their major urban regions. Global city formation and state re-scaling are therefore dialectically intertwined moments of a single dynamic of global capitalist restructuring. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of the interface between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe. A concluding section argues that new theories and representations of spatial scale and its social production are needed to grasp the rapidly changing political geography of late twentieth-century capitalism.

Gesellschaft erscheint uns heute im flackernden Licht der Verunsicherung. Nicht erst seit der Finanzkrise erweisen sich stabil geglaubte Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse als prekär. Der Autor stellt die wichtigsten ökonomischen und soziologischen Theorien der Prekarisierung vor und zeigt: Prekarität hat die Gesellschaft in ihrer Gesamtheit erfasst. Wir leben in der Prekarisierungsgesellschaft. Aber was ist daraus zu schließen? Marchart beschreibt die gegenwärtigen Sozialproteste und ihre Forderungen. Er untersucht ihre demokratiepolitischen Implikationen und führt hin zu einer Gesellschaftstheorie des Konflikts und der Kontingenz., Society appears to us today in the flickering light of instability. It has not just been since the financial crisis that matters related to working and living conditions have proved themselves to be precarious. The author introduces the most important economic and sociological theories of precarization, and demonstrates that precarity has seized society in its entirety. We live in the society of precarity. But what can be drawn from this? Marchart describes contemporary social protests and their demands. He investigates their democratic and political implications and works towards a social theory of the conflict and of its contingencies.

This article is about the key problem of the conflict between «living» labour and capital which is connected with the reflection of relevant tendency of capitalism development. In contrast to Marx’s thesis on expansion of «living» labour by capital, Post-operaists postulate the autonomy of affective labor from capital that allows to present the concept of «multitude» as critical in relation to the contemporary forms of capitalism development. The purpose of this article is to show the conflict character of both of these approaches and emphasize heuristic potential of this antagonism for the analysis of relevant forms of capitalism development.

This paper explores the emerging settlement surrounding vocational education and training in England in the 1990s. It describes and then considers the dangers in the post‐Fordist position that argues a high skills/high trust economy/society offers emancipatory possibilities. Insufficient attention is addressed to the way post‐Fordist concerns are lodged within capitalist social relations oriented to capital accumulation. Educational practices placed within these relations can easily lose their radicalism and sit readily alongside the concerns of curriculum modernisers who are wedded to capitalist rejuvenation.

L’article a pour objet de montrer l’intérêt d’un rapprochement entre la Théorie de la Régulation et le référentiel, analytique et normatif, du développement durable. Si ce rapprochement ne se conçoit pas sans précautions, les deux constructions ne se situant pas sur le même plan épistémologique, chacune aide cependant à éclairer les zones d’ombre laissées par l’autre. La mise en rapport est notamment féconde pour les entrées suivantes : conceptualisation du système économique, rapport aux institutions, prise en compte de l’environnement, rapport au temps, analyse des ruptures, et cadre spatial. À titre de première illustration, la suite de l’article mobilise les catégories régulationnistes pour questionner les dynamiques fordiste et post-fordiste(s) au crible de la durabilité. La mise en évidence d’antagonismes forts entre ces modes de développement particuliers et les enjeux de durabilité invite à se demander si, plus fondamentalement, certaines caractéristiques essentielles du capitalisme ne seraient pas en cause.Régulation theory and sustainable development. The article aims to show the importance of a rapprochement between Régulation theory and the analytical and prescriptive approaches of sustainable development. This rapprochement should not be considered lightly, as the two constructions are not on the same epistemological level, yet each helps to clarify the grey areas left by the other. The relationship is particularly productive in the following areas: conceptualisation of the economic system, relationship to institutions, recognition of environmental factors, time relationships, crises analysis and spatial framework. The article illustrates this rapprochement by using the regulationist categories to examine Fordist and post-Fordist dynamics from the sustainability viewpoint. The emergence of strong antagonisms between these particular modes of development and sustainability issues leads one to ask, more fundamentally, whether certain essential features of capitalism are not being questioned.

"Die anhaltende Tendenz zur Entberuflichung und Individualisierung moderner Erwerbsgesellschaften, wirft die Frage nach dem Wandel der sozialen Integration des Einzelnen in Arbeit und Erwerb auf. Die klassische Sozialtheorie vermag hier nur unzureichende Hilfestellung zu bieten, da sie dem Kategoriensystem einer beruflich verfestigten, dem Gesellschaftsvertrag der Industriemoderne verpflichteten, Status- und Solidaritätsordnung verhaftet ist. Aber auch die Antworten der neueren Arbeits- und Erwerbssoziologie, die innerhalb der Soziologie aktuell etwa unter dem Konzept des 'Arbeitskraftunternehmers' diskutiert werden, überzeugen nicht völlig, sehen diese die Erwerbsgesellschaft so weitgehend vom Sozialen entkoppelt, dass fraglich ist, wie ein allen marktförmigen Unsicherheiten preisgegebenes und nicht mehr in längerfristige Loyalitäts- und Vertrauensbeziehungen eingebundenes Arbeitssubjekt, sich ohne ein Mindestmaß an wertgestützter Identifikation und sozialer Gegenseitigkeit überhaupt mobilisieren und einbinden lassen soll. Daher soll am Beispiel der Analyse von Erwerbsordnungen innerhalb von Kulturberufen wie z. B. Journalismus, Werbung, Design oder der Filmindustrie ein weiterer Deutungsvorschlag gemacht werden, der versucht, normative Verankerungen 'atypischer' Beschäftigungsformen in hochqualifzierten Berufe exemplarisch nachzuvollziehen. Die zur Diskussion gestellte These ist, dass hier soziale Integrationsprinzipien entstanden sind, die weder dem Muster des zwar fremdbestimmten aber sozialstaatlich kompensierten verberuflichten Arbeitnehmers, noch dem durch exklusive Bildungstitel garantierten Elitestatus der klassischen Professionen, entsprechen. Das hier dominierende Vergesellschaftungsprinzip besteht vielmehr in der Kopplung individueller Einsatzmotive, Perspektiven und Aufstiegschancen an Reputationsmärkte, basierend auf einem neuen Ethos, das zu einem guten Teil von den kulturellen Eliten im Rahmen ihrer Kapitalismuskritik selbst entwickelt worden ist. Anhand von Beispielen einer Fallstudie soll gezeigt werden, wie die hier verhandelten Wert- und Identitätszuschreibungen traditionelle berufs- und betriebsbasierten Statuszuweisungen ersetzen bzw. verändern. Aus ihnen entspringen eben jene förderlichen Handlungsmuster, die sich in der vergangenen Epoche der marktlichen Radikalisierung von Erwerbsordnungen noch entgegengestellt haben." (Autorenreferat)

"Der Beitrag folgt einer dreiteiligen Argumentation: 1. Aus der Rekonstruktion einiger zentraler Elemente der fordistischen Gesellschaftsformation, deren Krise sowie der auf Krisenbewältigung gerichteten neueren Restrukturierungsprozesse des kapitalistischen Produktionsprozesses lässt sich die Leithypothese eines heterogen-ambivalenten Übergangs, einer Permanenz von Phasen im Globalisierungsprozess des Kapitals systematisch (und nicht nur als empirische Beschreibung) begründen. 2. Mit Hilfe dieses Befunds werden dann die Veränderungen in den Arbeits- und Beschäftigungsverhältnissen und ihre historische Bedeutung für die Reproduktion des kapitalistischen Systems beleuchtet. 3. Schließlich wird in einem dritten Schritt das so vielbemühte Transformationsproblem von Arbeitsvermögen in Arbeitsleistung reformuliert und um eine systematische Dimension erweitert. Daraus ergibt sich das Problem, die neue Bedeutung der Form Person (unter Rückgriff auf die Luhmannsche Kommunikationstheorie) zu erörtern." (Textauszug)

Narrated by a depressive and socially isolated protagonist, Michel Houellebecq's first novel Whatever traces the disaggregating effects of post-Fordism on the intimate spaces of human affect. Set in the burgeoning information technology industry of the mid-1990s among a hitherto literarily neglected social group of middle managers (cadres), the novel suggests that the cultural project of post-Fordist capitalism blights all human relations and leads to an existential pauperization of everyday life. The affective spaces of the human subject are no longer sites of pleasure but deeply agonistic ones. Heir neither to the hygienic aesthetic of the nouveau roman nor to a “death of affect” strain of literary postmodernism, Houellebecq's work is generically difficult to situate in the French or Anglo-American novelist tradition. A terse rejoinder to its socio-economic epoch, Whatever tests the viability of novelistic form in the face of the “indifference and nothingness” of the post-Fordist subject.

Like other crafters catering to tourists and international ethnic art markets, Zapotec weavers have become more closely tied to international capital and to increasingly flexible and dispersed schemes of production. Some Zapotec families have responded to such flexibility and now maintain several households in the Southwestern United States, U.S./Mexico border towns, and Oaxaca. The study of household petty commodity production thus requires a multisited field methodology for what are today dispersed Zapotec households enmeshed in the transnational production of Zapotec textiles. (Mexico, Zapotec, Chimayo, New Mexico, textiles, flexible production, multisited ethnography) In a provocative essay, George Marcus (1995:95) outlined the contours of an emerging ethnographic strategy that responded to what he referred to as "more complex objects of study ... such as the capitalist world system." He described a developing set of ethnographic practices more appropriate to the increasingly nonlocalized nature of the lives of those whom anthropologists study that at the same time captured and helped to configure the limits of their ill-defined social geographies. What Marcus called "multi-sited ethnography" delineated new understandings of particular social worlds that became increasingly dispersed in the later half of the twentieth century. Multisited ethnography, Marcus (1995:96) maintained, embodies a research design best suited to examining the "circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space." The ethnographic practices he outlined would follow people, things, metaphors, plots, stories or allegories, lives, and conflicts for new and better understanding. Resulting changes in the fieldwork habits of anthropologists would include a shift from prolonged field stays in a single location to shorter forays to multiple locations. Definitions of what constitute the field and fieldwork would in consequence be reworked to the extent that anthropology departments, professional organizations, libraries, museums, and institutions that fund social science research, as well as electronic spaces such as Web sites, listservs, and chat rooms frequented by anthropologists would become field sites in and of themselves. Many who study household petty commodity production in Mesoamerica do so through intense periods of residence and participant observation in a single location; usually a single community but sometimes a single household. Especially in the case of petty household commodities produced for touristic consumption, a great deal of recent research in Latin America, for example, has described how international capital has inserted itself into and reconfigured relations of production that were once internal to individual households. Complicated systems of subcontracting and the extraction of surplus value by intermediaries (whose economic and cultural capital is subsequently both enabled and recreated) are well described (e.g., Nash 1993; Ehlers 1993; Stephen 1993; and Stromberg-Pellizzi 1993). These studies, however, frame productive strategies unproblematically in terms of local connections to a generally conceived global system. Latin American ethnographers working in Mesoamerica, for example, having worked through legacies such as the closed corporate community and having long recognized the limitations of constructing rural communities as social universes unto themselves, reinvigorate the very divisions they attempt to overcome. Local/global distinctions treat the global and the local as entities that exist a priori even though researchers embraced a world-systems perspective; precisely in response to criticisms that they had either assumed or created ethnographic locales disconnected from their wider social and historical universes. Instead, a conceptual framework is needed in which these kinds of distinctions are blurred, where the local is seen to be riddled with the global and the latter is seen as the product of multiple locales. …

ResumenEn 1995 los autores del presente artículo escribieron un ensayo en el que reflexionaron acerca de la posibilidad de que la sociología del trabajo, con sus paradigmas disciplinarios “normales”, pudiera explicar las nuevas realidades que surgían en aquel momento como consecuencia del posfordismo en la fase globalizada del capitalismo. Doce años más tarde llevaron a cabo una lectura crítica, así como una actualización de aquellos conceptos, tratando de establecer nuevos retos para los estudios sociales del trabajo. En ambas ocasiones se afirmaba la existencia de una crisis de la sociología del trabajo marcada por un reduccionismo económico que tiende a considerar a los actores sociales del proceso de trabajo como meras categorías del “modelo fabril”. También se afirmó que la transformación radical de los actores sociolaborales del siglo xx, cada vez más evidente en los años noventa y claramente desarrollada en el siglo xxi, fue desafiando la delimitación temática de la disciplina. En consecuencia, era necesario incorporar dimensiones tanto subjetivas como colectivas en el contexto del análisis disciplinario. En este artículo, se proponen avanzar en la revisión de cuestiones teóricas que deben replantearse y modificarse con el objetivo de comprender el nuevo escenario global y sus consecuencias para las relaciones laborales y los trabajadores.AbstractIn 1995, the authors of this paper wrote an article asking whether Sociology of Work, with its “normal” disciplinary paradigms, could account for the new realities that were emerging at that time as a consequence of Post-Fordism in the globalized phase of capitalism. In 2012, a critical reading was carried out, as well as an update of those concepts, in an attempt to establish new challenges for social studies of work. On both occasions it was claimed that Sociology of Work faced a crisis marked by an economic reductionism that tends to consider social actors of the labor process as mere categories of the “factory model.” It was also stated that the radical transformation of the 20th century socio-labor actors -that was becoming increasingly evident in the 90 s and clearly developed in the 21st century-was modifying the ability to keep the focus on the discipline's mainstream. As a result, it was necessary to incorporate both subjective and collective dimensions into the context of disciplinary analysis. This paper aims at advancing theoretical issues that need to be reviewed and changed so as to understand the new global scenario and its consequences for labor relationships and workers.

Google’s dominance over the web allows it to dictate various norms and practices that regulate the state of contemporary capitalism online. The way in which Google operates as a company and generates revenue is often sidelined in academic discussions regarding the cultural implications of how its search engine functions. Almost 90% of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising, despite Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s original academic paper regarding Google in which they argue that advertising produces mixed motives that make it an unfeasible way to fund search engines. This article outlines how Google’s model of advertising reflects and encourages wider changes in capitalism as it shifts from its twentieth-century Fordist incarnation to contemporary Post-Fordist arrangements of labour. In doing so, this article analyses Google’s two main advertising systems, AdWords and AdSense, and proposes that these financial models have significant effects upon online discourse. In discussing AdWords, this article details some of the tensions between the local and the global that develop when tracing flows of information and capital, specifically highlighting Google’s impact on the decline of online language diversity. In outlining AdSense, this article demonstrates how Google’s hegemonic control prescribes which parts of the web can be monetised and which remain unprofitable. In particular, in drawing from existing studies, evidence is provided that Google’s AdSense programme, along with Google’s relationship with Facebook, incentivised the rise of fake news in the 2016 US presidential election. This work builds on existing scholarship to demonstrate that Google’s economic influence has varied and far-reaching effects in a number of contexts and is relevant to scholars in a range of disciplines. As such, this article is intended as a discursive introduction to the topic and does not require specific disciplinary background knowledge. In doing so, this article does not attempt to provide the final word on Google’s relationship to digital capitalism, but rather, demonstrate the profitability of a Post-Fordist perspective, in order to enable a wider engagement with the issues identified.

Ce texte tente de démêler l’écheveau que constitue le débat sur le post-fordisme, un débat qui s’inscrit dans un questionnement plus large sur l’avenir du capitalisme et qui resurgit de manière particulièrement virulente dans les périodes de Crise et de transition. Trois perspectives d’analyse du post-fordisme sont identifiées et analysées ici, chacune rattachée à une tradition précise de l’économie politique classique et, de fait, insistant sur différentes forces guides du capitalisme. Ces trois interprétations de la présente phase du capitalisme manifestent le désaccord sur la signification du post-fordisme : s’agit-il d’un dépassement du fordisme ou renvoie-t-il à la formation d’initiatives stratégiques et à un tournant historique?, This paper is an attempt to unravel the post-Fordist debate. This recurrent debate about the future of capitalism intensities during periods of crisis and transition. Three different perspectives on post-Fordism are identified and explored, each one evolving out of a particular tradition within classical political economy and stressing different driving forces in the historical development of capitalism. An underlying theme within the paper is the existence of significantly contrasting views about the openness of the new phase of capitalist development: disagreement over whether post-Fordism is primarily about the inevitable diffusion of a new and pervasive disciplining of labour or the formation of strategic initiatives and the making of history., Este texto se propone desentrañar la trama del debate sobre el posfordismo, debate que se inscribe dentro de una polémica más amplia acerca del futuro del capitalismo. Dicha polémica emerge con particular encono durante los períodos de crisis y de transición. Son analizadas tres visiones del posfordismo: cada una de ellas, alimentándose de una determinada tradición de la economía política clásica, enfatiza fuerzas motrices diferentes en el desarrollo histórico del capitalismo. La fase actual del desarrollo capitalista da lugar a interpretaciones muy distintas. En efecto, no existe un acuerdo sobre el significado del posfordismo. ¿Se trata acaso de una superación del fordismo o bien significa la formación de iniciativas estratégicas y de un viraje histórico?